You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

By Adam Morton

DRIVE to Waubra, a half-hour idle north-west of Ballarat, and you will find 128 wind turbines spread across the horizon, covering an area roughly 100 times greater than the Melbourne CBD.

It is Australia's largest wind farm, and it is a year old this month.

Wind farm policy is one of the few clear-cut differences between the major parties, and shapes as a significant issue in some regional seats.

The tallest turbines stretch 120 metres when the 41-metre blades are extended skyward. Stand in a nearby paddock and the whirr of the blades can just be heard, the equivalent of a car passing a few streets away.

According to Acciona Energy, which owns and operates the farm, the Waubra power station has fed 657 gigawatt hours of energy into the national electricity grid.

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Based on a simple formula published by consultants McLennan Magasanik Associates on behalf of the Victorian government, it means Australia's greenhouse gas emissions were 0.1 per cent lower than they would otherwise have been - a small but notable fraction.

Yet wind turbines are polarising machines, provoking visceral and at times angry responses.

When the Waubra farm was proposed in 2004, it attracted headlines when anti-farm campaigners were forced to move a meeting due to a bomb threat. More frequently, though, claims of aggression and threatening behaviour have mostly been levelled at wind farm opponents.

The pro-wind camp cite three examples. Late last year Energy Minister Peter Batchelor was jostled and had his leg jammed in a car door as he left a hostile community forum on wind farms at Colac, west of Geelong.

Not long afterwards an axe was taken to Acciona's 120-metre-high meteorological mast used to measure wind patterns at Waubra. A misspelt warning was left scrawled near the felled $150,000 machinery: ''no turbins''.

Wind farm opponents also paid for advertisements in the weekly Pyrenees Advocate warning of ''Waubra disease'', an illness said to include symptoms of sleep disturbance, nausea, headaches and increased heart rate that could be ''coming to a house, farm or school near you''.

No evidence was given to back the claims, but the advertisements heightened concerns in the local community and were blamed for sparking rumours that Waubra Primary School was to shut due to concerns that turbines several kilometres away were affecting children's health. The momentum of the rumour was so great that the school felt compelled to publish an emphatic denial in its newsletter, assuring parents the rumour was ''totally FALSE'' and that it was going nowhere.

The provocative ads were paid for by the Western Plains Landscape Guardians, part of a loose network of what national organisers say are nearly 70 community groups campaigning against wind farm developments in Victoria and South Australia.

Renewable energy advocates believe the ads are part of an ideologically driven misinformation campaign aimed at whipping up fear in communities where wind farms are proposed.

The guardians say they are just trying to be heard, and that their concerns about wind farm developments are being ignored.

The anger felt in pockets of central Victoria will not have been helped by two unrelated events over the past 10 days.

The first, in the final hours of the last parliamentary session, confirmed the passage of legislation revamping the national renewable energy target with cross-party support. It means electricity retailers will have to buy 18 per cent of the national supply from large-scale renewable plants by 2020. That growth in clean energy over the next decade is overwhelmingly expected to come from wind power, the cheapest and most viable renewable option.

The second came yesterday, with the release of a review by the federal government's National Health and Medical Research Council that found no published scientific evidence linking wind turbines with illness, undermining one of the wind farm opponents' key claims.

If the guardians feel they are being ignored, they know they have at least one ear: that of state Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu.

Under a policy released last month, Mr Baillieu announced that turbines would be banned along most of the coast, several mountain ranges, in or near national and state parks and designated regional population growth corridors and within two kilometres of any home unless a contract was signed with the owner. He said he supported renewable energy, but that local communities should have the key role in deciding where wind farms were built.

In response, Premier John Brumby held a press conference with the renewable energy companies and warned that the opposition policy would kill the wind industry in the state as it would effectively create a 13-square-kilometre exclusion zone around each home. South Australian Labor Premier Mike Rann agreed, welcoming the Coalition policy as a potential boon for wind farm construction in his state.

Wind farm policy is one of the few clear-cut differences between the major parties, and shapes as a significant issue in some regional seats at the November election.

The wind industry's goals are clear enough - to develop the industry and in the process turn a profit - but critics say the motivation behind the guardians is less transparent.

Acciona Energy managing director Brett Thomas says it is unclear whether the guardians are opposed to wind farms or completely reject the idea that renewable energy is needed to combat climate change. ''We don't really know what they are looking for and how they will be satisfied,'' he says.

The template for the Australian chapter of the landscape guardians is the British Coastal Guardians, an anti-wind power organisation run by climate change sceptics with strong links to the nuclear energy industry.

According to its website, the goal of the Australian Landscape Guardians is to protect the landscape, defined as ''anywhere between you and the horizon, even if that horizon is imagined''. Wind turbines are only one of several potential blights mentioned.

In practice, the group's objections are specifically related to wind farms and go beyond concerns about the landscape.

A recent submission by Victorian Landscape Guardians president Randall Bell objecting to a proposal at Yaloak lists several unrelated arguments against wind energy.

Primarily, it says the science of climate change is ''hopelessly flawed'' - a view that Mr Bell, a Geelong lawyer and former chairman of the National Trust, also promotes on an email distribution list. He says claims the Earth is warming are scientifically unreliable, and the idea of man-made climate change is headed for the ''Y2K dustbin''.

Mr Bell says that wind energy suffers from the ''incurable and fatal disease'' of intermittency and that turbines depreciate nearby land values by 40 per cent, kill thousands of birds and bats, pose a fire risk and cause significant health problems.

His views are backed in a submission on behalf of the Australian Landscape Guardians by Peter Mitchell, a founding chairman of the Moonie Oil Company and now chairman of Lowell Pty Ltd, which runs an investment fund focused on oil, gas and minerals.

Mr Mitchell's family owns Mawallock, a heritage-listed property in the Western District that would have turbines nearby under a proposal for a large farm at Stockyard Hill.

Mr Bell says ''the dirty secret'' about wind power is that politicians have documented evidence that it is a rort, but continue to back it because it is a visible sign they are doing something about climate change.

He says Mr Baillieu shares some of his concerns. The two met in the early 2000s and speak regularly, including before and after the launch of the opposition policy in May. But Mr Bell offers only limited praise for the Liberal policy, praising it as a ''good starting point''.

The guardians' criticisms are keenly disputed. The state government emphatically denies it has evidence that wind power does not work.

Critics of wind power say it will never be a reliable baseload power source that could be a like-for-like replacement for coal because turbines only turn when the wind blows, but backers say this misses the point - that a future energy grid will be a diversified mix of technologies of which wind could make up perhaps 20 per cent, running alongside other cleaner alternatives to coal, such as gas, hydro and possibly solar and geothermal.

Andrew Richards, executive manager with renewable energy company Pacific Hydro, says nobody has ever claimed there would be 100 per cent wind energy. ''I think even 100 per cent renewable energy will be tough, but we are not talking about that, we are talking about moving to a cleaner energy supply,'' he says.

Wind industry claims that turbines in Victoria operate on average at about 30 per cent of their capacity - considered a good return - are backed by the independent Australian Energy Market Operator.

The most contentious argument over wind farms is about health: that they produce infrasound, or low-frequency noise, that causes illness.

Few doubt that some people living near wind farms, particularly at Waubra, are genuinely suffering and believe turbines are to blame. A panel hearing investigating a wind farm application at Moorabool recently received a submission from 25 people relaying stories of deteriorating health since the wind turbines went up. Some say they have been forced to move away.

These stories resonate strongly in areas where turbines are proposed. As evidence, the guardians point to research by Dr Nina Pierpont, a New York paediatrician, and detailed in her book Wind Turbine Syndrome.

A review released yesterday by the federal Health and Medical Research Council says her claims are not being backed by peer-reviewed science, and have been heavily criticised by acoustic specialists.

It found no evidence that infrasound, electromagnetic interference, shadow flicker or blade glint from wind turbines were harmful to health, citing the World Health Organisation, an expert panel review in North America and a study of three wind farms in Britain. It notes that health problems may be a result of stress, and says potential impact can be minimised by following existing planning guidelines.

A contentious proposal for new national guidelines for developing wind farms will be debated by federal and state environment ministers on Monday.

However they are resolved, the site-specific issues that drive residents to join the guardians, including turbine location and local environmental concerns, will continue. A current example is the proximity of two proposed wind farms east of Ballarat. The proposal has been called in by the state government and is still being considered.